Why the demand for small fish fillets in restaurants is bad news for the oceans: salt: NPR

Bigger is not necessarily better when it comes to catching, selling and eating fish.

In fact, for some snappers, a market preference for whole fillets the size of a plate pushes anglers to target smaller fish. For some wild fish populations, it is a recipe for collapse.

"The preferred size of a net on the US market is for juvenile fish that have not had the chance to breed," said conservation biologist Peter Mous, director of the Fisheries Conservation Program. in Indonesia from Nature Conservancy. "Many species here are heavily overexploited, and this demand for small nets is worsening the situation."

Ecologists are particularly concerned about species such as Malabar snapper. Cute says that this fish reaches sexual maturity at 4 pounds and can reach up to 29 pounds – but global markets for restaurants and retailers prefer to buy it at 2 pounds and a pound.

"For a big species like giant ruby ​​red snapper, the differences are even more extreme," writes Mous in an email. "The trade buys them at 1 lb, but they only become adults at 9 lb. They can then reach 73 lb."

The Indonesian snapper fishery, studied by Mous since the late 1990s, focuses on many species in several genera. Breeding patterns and growth rates of these fish vary considerably, but for almost all species the market prefers mainly young fish. According to him, many species of snappers have already been depleted, which represents about 10% of their untapped biomass – term that refers to the total mass of the population rather than the number of individuals.

The organization of Mous tries to change the industry by encouraging buyers and exporters of seafood to commit to buying only fish of a size larger than a certain minimum size. This would encourage fishermen to catch larger snappers and leave juveniles in the water, allowing fish to reproduce and rebuild their populations.

The campaign is gaining ground. Norpac Fisheries Export, which sells to Safeway, Costco and other companies, signed the agreement in January, and a few weeks later, Netuno USA, the largest importer of frozen snappers in the United States, followed suit. not. Rachel Winters, Associate Director of Media Relations for Nature Conservancy, said eight other distributors have since announced their commitment to the fishing plan, including five on Sunday, March 17 in Boston, the first day of Seafood Expo North. America.

The demand for smaller fish appears to come mainly from the US retail and foodservice market, where many chefs and caterers tend to prefer not only intact whole fillets but also fillets that alone are a perfect part of it.

"Chefs prefer the fish where the size of the fillets is ready to serve," says Christian Monchâtre, a Paris-born chef who has worked for over 20 years in restaurants in Europe, Mexico and California. "It's profitable – you do not have extra pieces in which you have to develop other recipes to use them." Monchâtre says that chefs who end up with nets bigger than optimum "lose money every serving".

While whole fillets are an attractive and very popular style of service, the same goes for a whole fish, says Andre Brugger, Head of Sustainability Compliance and Quality Assurance at Netuno USA.

"Many places serve a whole snapper, and to be able to fit in the plate and serve two people, it can not be a huge fish," Brugger says.

Brugger explains that the demand for small and uniform fish fillets is highest in situations where a chef or restaurant serves a large number of people, such as on cruise lines or in hotel restaurants. .

"It's more effective for them," he says.

It's not everyone in the seafood industry. Kenny Belov, co-owner of Two X Sea, a San Francisco fish company, explains that most customers he works with, including large companies High-tech like Airbnb and SurveyMonkey, make fun of whether the nets need to be cut into irregular pieces to create the perfect size portion.

"They will say, 'We want 700 two-ounce servings,'" he said, noting that such a request would not "change the size of the fish I started with."

In addition, Belov says his buyers prefer larger fish. "I could show you a one year order for restaurants and every order specifies that they want the biggest fish possible."

This, he explains, is due to the fact that, for many species of fish, the larger each animal is, the more meat and fat it contains, as a percentage of its total live weight. It is therefore more profitable for him to buy the biggest fish he can have with fishermen.

Monchâtre stresses that it is just as profitable to process and serve very large fish as small fish. Large fillets can be easily cut into several hand-sized portions of equal or larger size and quality, and leftover belly meat and filleted carcasses may be enough to make a lot of ceviche or poke . It's the medium-sized fish, he says – such as the barely mature snapper – where chefs lose money.

But the question of which size of fish is optimal and the most durable can also go in the opposite direction. An article published in the journal Durability in 2011, catfish, rainbow trout and farmed sablefish converted foods to body mass more efficiently when they were younger. The bigger the fish, the less efficient they were using the feed, which made it more profitable to sell them small, reported the authors, led by Michael Tlusty.

This is good for fish farmers and buyers who want smaller fish. According to Monchâtre, farms that raise branzino in Greece, for example, make it "very easy to obtain fish of the same size".

But where Monchâtre views branzino farms as a solution for buyers interested in a uniformly sized product, Paul Greenberg, author of the book Four fish, believes that these farms could help fuel demand.

"What's the chicken and the egg?" he says. "Because this uniform product now presents itself in aquaculture, it could impose the same requirements on wild fisheries."

In his 2010 book, Greenberg wrote that "Greece is sending nearly one hundred million of these plate-size fish to dinners in Europe, the United States and beyond, every year".

Today, he says, branzino, also known as the Mediterranean Bar, remains a major export product from southern Europe and Turkey. Almost all fish are harvested at about a pound of weight, says Greenberg.

In addition to the immediate availability of uniform sized fish from farms, Greenberg also suspects that changes in how and how Americans eat could affect the way and choices of fishers. The move "to a service economy rather than a home-based economy," he said – and the growing popularity of ready-to-cook meal kits – is likely to create greater demand for ingredients of uniform size and shape, chefs face the challenge of feeding as many people as efficiently as possible.

Yukiko Krontira, marketing director of a Greek finfish company called Kefalonia Fisheries, explained in an email that the Mediterranean bar weighing about 12 to 20 ounces "was falling directly into the consumer's comfort zone", while Medium to large fish "do not have the same weight" demand as a portion of fish. "

Although sustainable fish farms can meet the demand for fillets and fillets the size of a portion, Belov believes that this uniformity generated by wild populations will promote unsustainable fishing.

"If you only want fillets of one size, there are not many fish that we eat in the world that offer you this option," he says, noting that salmon, halibut and tuna, among others are too big to eat that way. but are always appreciated.

Thomas Kraft, founder of Norpac Fisheries Export, says "standardization makes industries more profitable". But, he says, in the case of wild fish, it might be essential to break with industry standards to maintain the Indonesian snapper industry. Kraft expects chiefs, who serve as role models and even celebrities, to play a vital role in the evolution of the market and, ultimately, incite fishermen to try to catch more mature snappers.

"It must go down," he says.

Brugger, of Netuno USA, sees the same way. A change in demand from chefs and retailers will eventually reach the water level, and fishermen, he says, will respond.

"They will go elsewhere to catch bigger fish," he says.